GABRIEL ate each night in a small trattoria near his hotel. On the second night the owner treated him as though he was a regular who had been coming once a week for twenty years. Placed him at a special table near the kitchen and plied him with antipasti until Gabriel begged for mercy. Then pasta, then fish, then an assortment of dolci. Over coffee he handed Gabriel a note.
“Who left this?” said Gabriel.
He lifted his hands in a Roman gesture of befuddlement. “A man.”
Gabriel looked at the note: plain paper, anonymous script, no signature.
Church of Santa Maria della Pace. One hour.
THE night had turned colder, a gusty wind moving in the trees of the Villa Borghese. Gabriel walked for a time-along the Corso d’Italia, down the Via Veneto-then stopped a taxi and took it to the edge of the Centro Storico.
For twenty minutes he wandered through the narrow streets and quiet squares until confident he was not being followed. Then he walked to the Piazza Navona. The square was crowded in spite of the chill, cafés filled, street artists hawking cheap paintings.
Gabriel slowly circled the piazza, now pausing to gaze at an ornate fountain, now stopping to drop a few coins into the basket of a blind man strumming a guitar with just four strings. Someone was following him; he could feel it.
He started toward the church, then doubled back suddenly. His pursuer was now standing among a small group of people listening to the guitarist. Gabriel walked over and stood next to him.
“You’re clean,” the man said. “Go inside.”
THE church was empty, the smell of burning wax and incense heavy on the air. Gabriel moved forward through the nave and stood before the altar. Behind him the door opened and the sounds of the busy square filled the church. He turned to look, but it was only an old woman come to pray.
A moment later the doors opened again. A man this time, leather jacket, quick dark eyes-Rami, the old man’s personal bodyguard. He knelt in a pew and made the sign of the cross.
Gabriel suppressed a smile as he turned and gazed upon the altar. Again the doors opened, again the clamor of the piazza intruded upon the silence, but this time Gabriel didn’t bother to turn, because immediately he recognized the distinctive cadence of Ari Shamron’s walk.
A moment later Shamron was at his side, looking up at the altarpiece. “What is this, Gabriel?” he asked impatiently. Shamron had no capacity to appreciate art. He found beauty only in a perfectly conceived operation or the destruction of an enemy.
“These frescoes were painted, coincidentally, by Raphael. He rarely worked in fresco, only for popes and their close associates. A well-connected banker named Agostino Chigi owned this chapel, and when Raphael presented Chigi his bill for the frescoes, he was so outraged that he went to Michelangelo for a second opinion.”
“What was Michelangelo’s reaction?”
“He told Chigi he would have asked for more.”
“I’m sure I would have sided with the banker. Let’s take a walk. Catholic churches make me nervous.” He managed a terse smile. “A remnant of my Polish childhood.”
THEYwalked along the edge of the piazza, and the vigilant Rami shadowed them like Shamron’s guilty conscience, hands in his pockets, eyes on the move. Shamron listened silently while Gabriel told him about the missing collection.
“Did she tell the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Gabriel told him what Anna had said when he asked her the same question.
“Why would the old man keep the paintings secret?”
“It’s not unprecedented. Perhaps the nature of the collection didn’t allow him to show it in public.”
“Are you suggesting he was an art thief?”
“No, not an art thief, but sometimes things are a little more complicated than that. It’s possible Rolfe’s collection didn’t have the most pristine provenance. We are talking about Switzerland, after all.”
“Meaning?”
“The bank vaults and cellars of Switzerland are filled with history’s booty, including art. It’s possible those paintings didn’t even belong to Rolfe. We can assume one thing: Whoever took them did it for a specific reason. They left behind a Raphael worth several million dollars.”
“Can they be recovered?”
“I suppose it’s possible. It depends on whether they’ve been sold yet.”
“Can works like those be sold quickly on the black market?”
“Not without raising quite a racket. But then again, it might have been a commissioned theft.”
“Meaning?”
“Someone paid someone else to pull off the job.”
“Was the murder of Rolfe included in the fee?”
“Good question.”
Shamron seemed suddenly tired. He sat on the edge of a fountain. “I don’t travel as well as I used to,” he said. “Tell me about Anna Rolfe.”
“If we had a choice, we’d never be involved with her. She’s unpredictable, volatile, and she smokes more than you do. But she plays the violin like no one else I’ve ever heard.”
“You’re good with people like that. Restore her.” Shamron began to cough, a violent cough that shook his entire body. After a moment he said, “Does she have any idea why her father made contact with us?”
“She says she doesn’t. They weren’t exactly close.”
This seemed to cause Shamron a moment of physical pain. His own daughter had moved to New Zealand. He telephoned her once a month, but she never returned his calls. His greatest fear was that she would not come home for his funeral or say kaddish for him. He took a long time lighting his next cigarette. “Do you have anything to go on?”
“One lead, yes.”
“Worth pursuing?”
“I think so.”
“What do you need?”
“The resources to mount a surveillance operation.”
“Where?”
“In Paris.”
“And the subject?”
14
THE MINIATURE supercardioid microphone held by the man dressed as a priest was no longer than an average fountain pen. Manufactured by an electronics firm in the Swiss industrial city of Zug, it allowed him to monitor the conversation conducted by the two men slowly circling the Piazza Navona. A second man sitting in the café on the opposite side of the square was armed with an identical piece of equipment. The man dressed as a priest was confident that between them they had recorded most of what was being said.
His assumptions were confirmed twenty minutes later when, back in his hotel room, he synchronized the two tapes in an audio playback deck and slipped on a pair of headphones. After a few minutes, he reached out suddenly, pushed the STOP button, then REWIND, then PLAY.
“Where?”
“In Paris.”
“And the subject?”
“An art dealer named Werner Müller.”
STOP. REWIND. PLAY.
“An art dealer named Werner Müller.”
STOP.
He dialed a number in Zurich and relayed the contents of the conversation to the man at the other end of the line. When he had finished, he treated himself to a cigarette and a split of champagne from the minibar, the reward for a job well done. In the bathroom, he burned the pages of his notebook in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain.